To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subj: Information and OA Dear All,
Since several months I receive each week a number of emails sollicitating me to submit papers to OA (Open Access) journals. Probably many of you receive such emails, too. I am happy that OA journals exist because they provide a free access to scientific information all around the world for those accessing to internet. The counterpart of this free access is that the authors have to pay a page charge, and this is reasonable because the publishers must earn money, as for non OA journals. But while there are several publishers doing a good job, there is an increasing number of predatory publishers. I can see that even experienced Academics are unaware of this problem and it is why I am writing these lines. A list of predatory publishers was established by the librarian Jeffrey Beall: see http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ and related pages. In many cases it can be checked that the content of this list is right while in some cases it may be discussed. The quality of a journal does not depend only on the publisher: it strongly depends on the work of the Editor-in-Chief. The quality of the journals of a given publisher may greatly vary from one journal to an other journal. It can also vary along the time. Then let me recall that even the most prestigious non OA journals such as Science or Nature published doubtful papers (e.g. it happened that papers in Science were retracted). Conversely, it happened that good papers can be published in unrecognized journals, and even sometimes in the proceedings of unimportant conferences. The extreme case may be arXiv, in which poor papers can be found together with major quality papers (while unpublished in journals: e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman). Thus, deciding to classify a publisher as predatory or not is difficult, and the result of this decision can hide a complex reality that should be examined. Your opinions are welcome. Best regards, Michel. Michel Petitjean MTi, INSERM UMR-S 973, University Paris 7, 35 rue Helene Brion, 75205 Paris Cedex 13, France. Phone: +331 5727 8434; Fax: +331 5727 8372 E-mail: petitjean.chi...@gmail.com (preferred), michel.petitj...@univ-paris-diderot.fr http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.html _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
